How To Have Happier Clients and Better Leads Using Photography Questionnaires

I think I’m in love.

My friend Andy recently told me about something called Gravity Forms that he uses for his client questionnaires and contracts.

I’ve been doing an informal questionnaire with my wedding clients before each wedding, but Andy and I photographed two weddings together this past month, and we used his questionnaire. It was so awesome to have all that information in one place and I loved how easy his form was to use. So I finally bit the bullet and purchased it this past weekend.

Oh. My. Word.

This little WordPress plugin rocks my world.

It’s the most easy to create form I’ve ever seen, and being able to use conditional logic (that’s a fancy way of saying that you only show certain questions based upon answers to other questions before it) is just rad.

Yeah, I just used the word “rad”. I like to pretend I’m cool. 😉

So after figuring it out and getting it all set up, I immediately decided that I had to tell you all about it and why I think you should buy it, too.

Not only that, but I created a free contact page for you to use on your photography site, just because I love you and want to save you some time.

Why are questionnaires and a good contact form so important?

A good questionnaire will help set expectations for your clients and will help you to know about any expectations that your clients have before the photography shoot. If you deliver what your clients want and know what that is up front, you’re going to have happier clients, fewer problem clients, and better word-of-mouth advertising.

It also makes things like wedding days go more smoothly when you have all the details, and that’s just good for everyone involved.

A strong contact sheet will give you more accurate information from your inquiries which will help you convert them into clients more quickly. Who doesn’t want that? More clients = more money = awesome sauce.

Gravity Forms makes collecting leads and client information easy

Being able to easily collect information from your clients and leads and keep it all in one central place is invaluable to me.

Because Gravity Forms integrates right into your own WordPress site, you don’t have to go searching through your email to find your client’s questionnaire (although you should set it up to send a copy to your email as well). You simply go to the “Entries” part of the plugin and it will list off all the forms that have been submitted so you can easily see the one you need.

Get the specific information you want from different types of leads

Do you offer several types of photographic services? The forms can be easily set up so that if someone says that they want wedding photography information, it will automatically ask them wedding related questions (such as the date, venue, etc.) Or if they select that they want newborn portraits, you can ask them their due date and they’ll never see the wedding questions.

The ability to have all these different options all in one form is ridiculously amazing and super-helpful in collecting the information you need specific to each lead.

Download our free contact form!

I want to make this as easy for you as possible, as I know you probably have more things to do than you have time in the day. So I created this contact form for you to download and use for free with Gravity Forms.

Here’s what you need to do:

First, go buy Gravity Forms for yourself (it is currently $39 for a single site license, which is ridiculously cheap in my opinion). This is an affiliate link, so I get a few dollars if you click that link and then buy it, so thanks. If this bothers you, you can easily find the link using Google so feel free to do that too. Whatever you decide to do, definitely pick this tool up.

Quick Tip: The developer license (which is significantly more expensive) also incorporates PayPal into the forms, so if you ever want to use this for your contracts (which is what I plan to do eventually) you may wish to purchase the developer package now.

Next you’ll need to install Gravity Forms. I took a video of myself doing it so you can see how it works. It took less than 4 minutes to install. See for yourself:

Next, right-click (or control+click on a Mac) the following link and save it somewhere on your computer where you’ll be able to find it. PLEASE NOTE: clicking directly on the link may open a window with a lot of random code, as it’s an xml file, so you’ll need to make sure you’re saving it somewhere on your computer instead.

Now import this form into Gravity Forms and get it all set up. I made another video that imports the form, shows you all the settings you need to change to make it send you emails when someone uses it, and explains how to add the contact form to a page for people to use in about 9 minutes. Super-easy.

Finally, take some time to make any changes and customizations you want to fit your business better. I give you a brief overview of how to make new fields, change existing fields, and create conditional logic magic (that is, the questions that show up change based upon a prior answer) in around 7 minutes.

Save time and buy our photography questionnaires

Now that you see how easy it is to use Gravity Forms, save yourself even more time by buying our photography questionnaires. I had to put these together anyways over the past few days, so I thought I’d give you the opportunity to save all that time and simply be able to import and use them in just a few minutes.

So not only do you get amazing questionnaires ready to go in just a few minutes (and better photos and happier clients because of it) you also help make an real impact on the lives of people throughout the world.

Cool, huh?

My friend Trisha picked up Gravity Forms on my recommendation and I sent her the questionnaires to test, and here’s what she had to say about it:

I just wanted to take a second and thank you so much for the awesome questionnaires using Gravity Forms. Thank you for turning me on to Gravity Forms. The plug-in functionality makes it incredibly user friendly and the cost isn’t bad either! Thank you, also, for the amazing forms. The contact form is perfect for getting to know my clients and their needs. It gathers far more information than my old contact sheet and the ability to only show relevant questions is priceless. This will truly make my customer’s feel like their individual needs are important to me.

The wedding questionnaire is amazing! It was so easy to import that I almost didn’t believe that I had done it right! It integrated so quickly into my website! The questions and conditional logic that you have built into this form are fantastic. Integrating this form into my wedding workflow has saved me HOURS of work! Thank you so much!

[…] which has been updated to include three different versions of the questionnaires (Word, PDF, and Gravity Forms for easy integration into your website). Questionnaires make doing businesses so much easier and […]

If you have the Gravity Forms plugin and wordpress, you can put them right on a page for your clients to fill out, yes. They also come in PDF and Word doc forms so that you aren’t required to buy anything else if you don’t want to.

[…] Yeah, I just used the word “rad”. I like to pretend I’m cool. So after figuring it out and getting it all set up, I immediately decided that I had to tell you all about it and why I think you should buy it, too. How to Have Happier Clients using Photography Questionnaires […]